Articles in category: Digital Services

The path for SaaS domination of a market segment has historically followed one of two routes: bringing previously offline workflows online, or moving on-premise software processes online. In short, SaaS would take over segments that previously were not SaaSified. Yet, the current wave of HR SaaS innovators the past few years is proving that there can be more to the story.

Simply put, containers offer a lightweight alternative to virtual machines, offering even greater resource utilization, simplified management and the ability to quickly move applications between servers. A panel discussion at Cloud World 2016 in London last month - which included representatives from the analyst, vendor and end user communities - gave a balanced view of some of the business benefits alongside the limitations as more companies investigate the technology.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are already proliferating in the enterprise. However, many business leaders don't realize they're leveraging technologies that rely on AI. Survey shows that 26 percent of respondents said they are currently using AI technologies in the workplace to automate manual, repetitive tasks.

Most consumers think biometric authentication is the best way to secure payments via mobile devices, Visa survey finds. Biometric authentication is found to be valued in both face-to-face and online transactions. The Visa Biometric Payments study, which surveyed 14,000 people across Europe, revealed that 73% of people think biometric security checks on a payments device is a secure authentication, with fingerprint the preference for 81% of consumers, followed by iris scanning. Only 15% would use selfies to authenticate payments and only 12% would use voice recognition.

Silicon Valley is justifiably seen as the geographical center of digital innovation. From Google and Facebook to Uber and Netflix, the Valley is home to many global technology leaders. However, when searching for the next big startup, the time has come to look beyond Silicon Valley.

It’s anticipated that there will be more than 4.8 billion individuals using a mobile phone by the end of 2016. Because of this enormous growth, we can expect to see the mobile payments industry and startups in the space evolve to meet the growing demands of users. The uniform help and speed in which we will be able to carry out transactions continues to show us a compelling movement in the evolution for mobile payments and the trend that by 2020, 90 percent of smartphone users will have made a mobile payment.

In the past five years, growth hacking has exploded in popularity among savvy internet marketers, SaaS companies, and technical product entrepreneurs. Growth hacking is a fairly simple concept: It’s the idea that every strategy, idea, project, or tactic you develop and implement at your business should be centered around one thing: Driving growth. The whole point of growth hacking is to develop and run lean tests, campaigns, and programs that can help you better identify viable strategies, channels, and focus areas that you can use to scale your business.

There has been a flurry of activity over the past several years in the Fintech space. From startups to established technology ventures such as Alibaba and PayPal, companies are working to disrupt and capture market share from traditional financial institutions — which are truly giants compared with the upstarts of today. But this article states that Fintech is not an area where we will see the rapid changes and growth as occurred in mobile messaging, or even the mobile phone industry with Apple’s takeover of Nokia. Thus, startups challenging the financial sector are playing the long game; there will be ...

Everyone seems to be jumping on the bot bandwagon. Chatbots are not only being touted as the end of apps, but also the next paradigm in human-computer interaction. But bots are unlikely to live up to these outsized expectations anytime soon. The fact is that the AI technology used to power chatbots simply isn’t mature enough to come close to replacing humans for anything but the most trivial tasks — the same ones that are already well-suited to apps. With expectations set so high, be prepared to see a lot of frustration and disappointment as reality sets in.

“Hardware is hard,” but “hard work pays off.” This proved true for Sony and Apple and is certainly proving true for Geotab now in the IoT. Two-sided markets are the perpetual motion machines of the business world. Two-sided markets, also called two-sided networks, are economic platforms having two distinct user groups that provide each other with network benefits. The laws of physics deny such things in the physical world. Hardware can create them in the Internet of Things world.

It’s happening, fast and furious: Disruptive consumer and enterprise technologies continue to rapidly transform the way we work and live — across verticals and throughout the consumer experience, the business-to-business world and the entire supply chain. From cloud, mobile, and Big Data and Analytics to IoT, 3D printing, biotech and cybersecurity, entire industries and business models are quickly shifting as emerging technologies gain momentum, moving from experimental options to mainstream acceptance and maturity.

The online contract review platform LawGeex is pioneering the use of artificial intelligence to evaluate business contracts. On Tuesday, the Israeli startup announced it had raised $2.5 million, which the two year-old company will use to offer its contract review service for free to consumers.LawGeex enterprise customers include Deloitte and Brandwatch.

Silicon Valley is building the new-world insurance agent. The industry accounts for 7 percent of U.S. GDP, with more than $1.1 trillion of net premiums paid annually. The aged way of conducting business is pushing the Valley to disrupt all layers of the value chain. Most carriers do not allow consumers to purchase insurance online — they make consumers purchase through an agent. To keep the peace with agents, most carriers will provide an online quote, then direct you to the nearest agent instead of an online checkout.

Most startups don’t have the budget, or the need, for enterprise software – or an elaborate website. But as your business grows, adding products or services, as well as customers and employees, it makes sense to invest in technology to help manage that growth. Does that mean you need to invest in an ERP or supply chain management system? Probably not. At least not right away. But these six cloud services, all targeted at SMBs, can make scaling your small ecommerce or bricks-and-mortar business a lot easier.

In today’s fast-paced digital world, the ability to adapt quickly and effectively to the plethora of changing market and consumer trends offers a key competitive advantage to businesses. To increase their speed and agility, organisations around the globe are pursuing cloud-based analytics solutions as a way to make swifter and more informed, data-driven decisions involving customer engagement or operational strategy.

A new generation of recruiting, hiring, applicant tracking and candidate management software solutions are incorporating new features, inspired by CRM and marketing automation, to help conquer recruiters' and hiring managers' biggest challenges. "We're solving the most common problems companies have with sourcing and hiring: aggregating information about all potential candidates; maintaining updated information about candidates; and communicating with that candidate pool on an ongoing basis," says Evan Lesser, general manager at getTalent.

Quocirca research published in 2015 showed that all organisations now interact online with external users. To manage these relationships and provide controlled access to applications businesses need to know who the individual users are. Identity and access management has extended from being solely an internal IT management process to focus on external business engagement too.

Stores that fail to embrace in-store technology – namely integrating smartphone apps with the customer shopping experience – risk their own extinction. By 2025, a brave new consumer world will exist – one in which sales no longer dictate the value of stores, waiting in line is a thing of the past and customers will share, try on and print retail items from the comfort of their homes.

We’re seeing a lot of gloom and doom in the SaaS space and the techworld in general as valuation multiples have compressed and late-stage funding has become more challenging. However, there still exists tremendous opportunity to build large, valuable companies in the SaaS space by building a “system of record.”A system of record (SOR) is software that serves as the backbone for a particular business process.

Smartphones and tablets are becoming a fixture in business as industries embrace mobile technology -- for example, field workers are relying on portable rugged devices and retail shops are managing an entire store from a single tablet. So it's not surprising that technology manufacturers are rushing to become the industry standard.

While the headlines on wearables tend to focus on athletes and those who are already in good health, the business case for wearables for managing issues that afflict the elderly, coupled with the time and financial constraints on their caregivers, may be even more robust, if the right solutions could be made available.

Captive centers currently account for less than 25 percent of the full-time employees delivering digital services, such as analytics, cloud and mobility, from offshore and nearshore locations, according to research by outsourcing consultancy Everest Group. However, these wholly owned subsidiaries are uniquely qualified to play a pivotal role in the digital transformation of their parent companies, says Everest Group practice director Aditya Verma.

Small businesses are increasingly leaning on Software as a Service, or SaaS, to automate everyday tasks and optimize crucial workflows. Because a new cloud-powered app seems to crop up every minute, you may find it hard to navigate the plethora of offerings. Here, we’ve rounded up a selection of five of our favorite SaaS apps for businesses.

Supporting the organization’s sales department is one of the best ways that IT leaders position themselves as strategic contributors. What does that contribution look like in practice? It starts with learning what sales people do and what their challenges are. The next step is to streamline, automate and equip them with tools to make them more productive.